…DSM-5 is now on sale for $199 in hardcover and $149 in paperback. The APA has never made the DSM freely available (it is an important source of revenue) and no change in that policy is planned…A digital version is promised within a few months through a secure website and also as mobile device applications. Revisions will be more frequent and most likely would be distributed only electronically, Kupfer said.

The widely criticized new version of the U.S. psychiatric diagnostic manual due out faces a potentially diminished role in research, which would mark a shift for what has been considered the bible of American psychiatry for 30 years.

…Dr. Kupfer, the DSM leader, said researchers should look at the DSM as “a guide but not necessarily the only framework they should use to carry out basic science.”

“For the DSM to be considered primarily a guide for clinicians is a “dramatic backtracking from their prior position as putting themselves out there as the best basis for research,” said Geoffrey Reed, senior project officer at the World Health Organization…Most of the research funded by the NIMH and published in psychiatry journals in the past 20-plus years had to use DSM diagnostic criteria; otherwise, scientists had no hope of publishing, said Dr. Reed.

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, has divided medical opinion

[Ed: Note according to a WPA-WHO 2011 Survey, around 11% of practising UK psychiatrists and around 23% of practising psychiatrists surveyed globally reported using DSM-IV more than ICD-10.]

…Though not used in the UK, where doctors turn to the World Health Organisation’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD), the US manual has global influence. It defines groups of patients, and introduces new names for disorders. Those names can spread, and become the norm elsewhere. More importantly, the categories redefine the populations that are targeted by drugs companies.

…Although Europe trails behind the USA in terms of market revenue, ADHD therapeutics markets are expected to show strong growth, with Spain predicted to witness a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% over 2012-2018, beating the USA’s CAGR of 6% during the same future period. European markets have not yet neared the saturation point that ADHD therapeutics are facing in the USA, and there is an optimistic view for ambitious growth in this region.

…Ironically, DSM-5 has come under attack from the autism community for rewriting the autism spectrum classification in ways that autism advocates have feared will disqualify many children from receiving autism diagnoses — a controversy that Frances did not address…But he did suggest that the DSM in general has become too important after a very modest beginning in the 1950s.

“The DSM … has since acquired perhaps too much real-world influence as the arbiter of who gets what treatment and whether it will be reimbursed; who is eligible for disability benefits, Veterans Affairs benefits, and school and mental health services; and who qualifies to receive life insurance, adopt a child, fly an airplane, or buy a gun,” Frances observed.

The revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) provides a useful opportunity to revisit debates about the nature of psychiatric classification. An important debate concerns the involvement of mental health consumers in revisions of the classification. One perspective argues that psychiatric classification is a scientific process undertaken by scientific experts and that including consumers in the revision process is merely pandering to political correctness. A contrasting perspective is that psychiatric classification is a process driven by a range of different values and that the involvement of patients and patient advocates would enhance this process. Here we draw on our experiences with input from the public during the deliberations of the Obsessive Compulsive-Spectrum Disorders subworkgroup of DSM-5, to help make the argument that psychiatric classification does require reasoned debate on a range of different facts and values, and that it is appropriate for scientist experts to review their nosological recommendations in the light of rigorous consideration of patient experience and feedback.

Campaign timed to coincide with rollout of American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5, Open Paradigm Project

SAN FRANCISCO, May 18, 2013 — /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Open Paradigm Project, in collaboration with MadinAmerica.com, Occupy Psychiatry, and leading organizations in the movement to reform mental health care, announces a social media campaign showcasing video testimonials by individuals negatively impacted by the traditional psychiatric model, which focuses on pathology and illness rather than wellness and recovery. The launch coincides with the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) rollout of its latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), taking place at the APA’s annual meeting in San Francisco this weekend. In light of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director Thomas Insel’s move away from the DSM (“lack of validity… patients deserve better”) and DSM-5 task force chair David Kupfer’s admission of an absence of biological markers of mental illness (“we’re still waiting”), these stories starkly unveil the failure of, and harm done by, the prevailing model of mental health care…

DSM 5 and exclusively biological psychiatry must be completely rethought

The following is an extract of the Mental Health Europe article:

Western psychiatry is in crisis. The direction taken by the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5), due to be published later this week, has received ample criticism. Moreover, in disagreement with the American Psychiatric Association, the United States National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the world’s largest research institute, has announced they will no longer fund projects based exclusively on DSM categories. Unfortunately, while Mental Health Europe considers the NIMH decision to be the right one, by focusing almost entirely on neuroscience and on so-called disorders of the brain, the NIMH is missing out on the critical importance of user experiences to psychiatric research and to the practice of psychiatry…

For a single post that shows how weirdly and unevenly psychiatric diagnosis actually works (and fails to work) in this country, and what that means for the new DSM, get over to Maia Svalavitz’s clear-eyed account of her own five diagnoses (and the one she never got)…

You don’t need to be a mental health professional to take an interest in the recently published fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

…Recently, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology has attacked the psychiatric profession for offering a biomedical model for understanding mental distress. But its criticism was not directed at the ethos of medicalisation as such, but only at the tendency to associate mental illness with biological causes. What it offered was an alternative model of medicalisation – one where mental illness was represented as the outcome of social and psychological cause. It seems that medicalization has become so deeply entrenched that even critics of the DSM accept its premise.